Jul 4, 2010 | Branding, Marketing
Those who say one thing and do another have always been at risk of being found out. Now, the capabilities of the net make it virtually inevitable, with the downside risk to your brand being multiplied by the probability of being found out.
BP has spent millions on PR, advertising, logo changes, and acquisitions aimed at positioning themselves as clean and green nurturers of the environment, all of which is now just fuel for the fire of hypocrisy flaming alongside their spill in the Gulf.
The question is not of survival, as BP has assets the world needs, at least for the easily foreseeable future, but their cost of doing business will increase, as no-one will ever trust them again, no matter how much they spend.
BP is now an “ex-brand” as dead as the ubiquitous parrot due to BP being unable to walk and talk to the same tune, how is yours going?
Jul 1, 2010 | Customers, Marketing, Social Media
As a group, you may not like something. A style of music, a literary style, a type of product, a group of people, but when you see one of the group individually, and find you like it, or them, the rest of the genre becomes less confronting.
It is the same with brands, the closer you get to a part of the brand, the easier it is to find things about the whole that you like, and you can more easily justify involvement, and scoff at your previous dislike. Cognitive dissonance at work.
By definition you only get closer to a brand if it is delivering something to you, so it is a bit of a circular process, but the lesson for markets is that to build a brand, you need to get close.
The tools of “getting close” have changed, they used to be largely one way communication mechanisms, but now we have the power and tools of the web, so get close, engage, embrace, and succeed.
Jun 27, 2010 | Branding, Customers, Marketing, Small business
“Cheap” implies less of everything that is important, not built to last, minimal attention to the detail, and certainly little customer service. However, “Frugal” implies a discipline that ensures that waste is eliminated, unnecessary features eliminated, but the basic performance is not compromised.
Cheap is never the outcome of good marketing, but Frugal is a very potent positioning in most markets, and is often ignored in the search for wider customer appeal.
Next time, ask yourself, if it is cheap, in which case, don’t buy or produce it, or frugal, in which case it may be a good deal.
Jun 22, 2010 | Branding, Communication, Customers, Marketing
How often we confuse the reasons our customers buy products, how easy it is to get carried away with the technology, the newness, the features of the product, and never consider the real, usually unstated drivers of consumption.
Great marketing is always about the benefits a product brings to the consumer, and whilst the features play a role in delivering the benefits, consumers do not really care about features, they want what the product delivers for them.
Defining the benefits is marketing, translating them into images and words consumers can relate to is advertising, and is only a tiny slice of marketing, at the end of the process.
Poor products, no matter how well advertised, do not succeed, great products with poor marketing that fails to identify the benefits of consumption, usually fail, but even poorly advertised products with clear and distinctive benefits usually find their way, because consumers are generally smart enough to make the connection. It is this last distinction that may appear at first glance to be semantic, that is often the biggest hurdle. This great clip from Mad Men says it all.
Jun 20, 2010 | Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
As the web makes the marginal cost of anything that can be delivered electronically too close to zero to measure, the world of marketing changes. Convincing the boss that the capacity of the rack of servers he has just shelled out for should be given away is often a challenge, but the reality is that the world is chasing itself down to free, and many businesses need to figure out how to make money in different ways. The solution still escapes most in the music industry (although Radiohead have done OK) but it is early days, or is it?
The original “free” product was the safety razor blade, given away by King Gillette in a whole array of ways, but a blade is not much good without the razor, and an industry was born, so this dilemma is not new, just different, and far more pervasive.
